Many computer applications need to manipulate a database and its internal components, e.g. tables, such as by storing records into and retrieving records from those tables. The database may be a traditional database management system (DBMS) such as a relational DBMS.
This manipulation often requires an application programmer to write specific code for each table. The coding effort is often tedious, is prone to errors, and requires a considerable amount of time, especially as the number of tables in the DBMS increases. In addition, the application software code often needs to be customized based on a low level DBMS application programming interface (API) and the specific DBMS being accessed.
The most common approach for coding database manipulation code is to write, by hand, the computer code needed. Typically, programs need to be written to perform the same repetitive function on every table in the DBMS. The disadvantages of this approach include (a) it requires a technical programming resource to write basic database manipulation code for each table in the system, which takes time; (b) the resulting code is prone to errors, since most of the programming is tedious and repetitive; (c) each line of code is tested during unit testing, since each line was coded by hand; (d) it requires valuable programming resources when program developers could be utilized on other programming tasks; and (e) changes to the specific underlying API or to the coding structure in general are applied to the code.